ABSTRACT

A long time ago, when it was still the twentieth century, I made the claim that cyberpunk was over. I repeated the lines by the Greek poet Cavafy that Lucius Shepard quoted in his own requiem for the (sub)genre: “What will we do now that the barbarians are gone? / Those people were a kind of solution” (quoted in Hollinger, “Cybernetic” 216). I was already becoming nostalgic for cyberpunk’s accounts of visceral encounters at the human/ machine interface and for its noir-inflected dramas of transformed posthuman subjectivities-cyborgs, clones, artificial and virtual intelligences. Cyberpunk was one of SF’s most appealing and informed responses to questions about how the genre might represent our lives in the computer/ ized worlds of technoculture. Cyberpunk really was “a kind of solution.”1